Free Republic

Former President Trump announced his campaign leadership team in Iowa on Monday — a move that comes as the former president has spent recent weeks in other early presidential primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina. Trump has hired Eric Branstad and state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann (R) as senior advisers and Marshall Moreau as his state director, and named Alex Latcham as his early states director. He’ll head political operations in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada and Iowa. Branstad worked on the former president’s last two presidential campaigns in the state in addition to working under the Trump administration...

DES MOINES, Iowa - Ted Cruz arrives Monday for his first Iowa trip of 2016, but he won't just be battling Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. He'll been fending off the state's influential corn lobby. As Cruz kicks off a six-day bus tour across the state, his critics in the state's ethanol industry will be trailing close behind in a RV. They're hoping to highlight the Texas senator's opposition to a federal mandate that ethanol be mixed into gasoline at each of Cruz's planned 28 stops."We're going to be turning out all of our allies," said Eric Branstad, the son...

Conventional wisdom says that you cannot win Iowa without kissing the pinky ring of the Iowa corn lobby and pledging your fealty to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the anti-science policy which is bad for the environment, fuel mileage, and America at large. Iowa’s traditional role as the first Presidential contest for both parties basically ensures that anyone with even a whiff of Presidential ambition has largely taken a pass at criticizing a policy which is a bad idea for everyone except an extremely well-connected group of corn farmer lobbyists.Ted Cruz has been challenging all that with his current Presidential...